How to hire an HR manager

How to Hire the Right HR Manager

Define Your HR Needs and Expectations

Before beginning your search, clearly articulate what you need from an HR manager. Consider your company size, industry, growth stage, and current HR challenges. Determine whether you need someone focussed on compliance, employee development, recruitment, or strategic planning. Document specific responsibilities like managing benefits, handling employee relations, overseeing performance management, or building company culture. This clarity will help you identify candidates with the right skill set and experience level for your organisation's unique requirements.

Craft an Effective Job Description

Write a compelling job description that accurately reflects the role's scope and your company culture. Be specific about daily responsibilities, reporting structure, and growth opportunities. Include required qualifications separately from preferred qualifications to avoid unnecessarily limiting your candidate pool. Highlight unique aspects of your organisation that would attract top HR talent, such as innovative benefits, professional development opportunities, or meaningful company mission. Use clear, inclusive language that appeals to diverse candidates while accurately representing the position's challenges and rewards.

Interview Strategies and Key Questions

Structure your interview process to assess both technical competence and cultural fit. Include behavioural questions that reveal how candidates have handled difficult situations like employee conflicts or compliance issues. Ask about their experience with HR metrics and how they measure success in previous roles. Present hypothetical scenarios relevant to your workplace to gauge their problem-solving approach. Include multiple stakeholders in the interview process, including senior leadership and potential team members, to get diverse perspectives on each candidate's suitability.

Evaluate Cultural Fit and Leadership Style

Assess whether candidates align with your company values and can effectively represent your organisation's culture. Observe how they interact with different people during the interview process, from reception staff to executives. Discuss their philosophy on employee engagement, performance management, and workplace conflict resolution. Consider their leadership style and whether it complements your existing management team. Look for evidence of adaptability and change management skills, especially if your organisation is growing or undergoing transformation.

Qualities to look for in a HR Manager

Flexibility

The right HR manager needs to be flexible, and needs to have capabilities in recruitment, compensation, learning and development, safety, compliance, performance management, and workplace disputes. On top of all this, you also need to facilitate more data-driven decision-making and make the most of emerging technologies without taking the human out of HR.

Deep expertise

Deep expertise involves detailed knowledge and experience often gained through years of continuous work in that specific area. It also relates to being able to effectively apply that knowledge in complex and challenging situations, which can of course arise sometimes in the beautifully messy world of people in workplaces. So, that ideal HR candidate would need both general and specific expertise in any number of areas.

Soft skills and hard skills

Just like most workplaces, most HR functions require a mix of both technical ‘hard’ skills and psychosocial ‘soft’ skills. The ideal HR manager doesn’t just need technical expertise in areas like data analytics and compliance; they also need to be a people expert, with strong emotional intelligence, communication and conflict resolution skills. But it doesn’t stop there, because they also need to be able to teach and develop those same diverse skills across the organisation through leadership training and development. Finding one or two people who can do all of this well is difficult, to say the least.

When to hire an HR manager

Determining the right time to bring on an HR manager isn't just about hitting a magic number, but employee count does provide useful guidance. Most businesses can manage HR functions internally when they have fewer than 20 staff members. However, as you approach 25-30 employees, you'll likely notice that HR tasks are becoming more demanding and time-consuming.

For companies experiencing rapid expansion, the math changes significantly. If you're planning to double your workforce within a year, bringing in HR support before you hit traditional thresholds makes strategic sense. Managing large-scale recruitment and onboarding becomes a specialised job that requires dedicated attention.

Some signs include:

• Administrative Overload: When payroll processing, benefits administration, and compliance documentation start consuming entire days rather than hours, you've likely outgrown DIY HR management.
• Regulatory Complexity: As your business grows, employment law requirements become more intricate. Mistakes in areas like workplace safety, discrimination policies, or wage calculations can be costly.
• Employee Relations Issues: When workplace conflicts, performance management, or grievance procedures become frequent occurrences, having someone trained in human resources becomes invaluable.
• Recruitment Challenges: If finding and hiring quality candidates is taking significant time away from core business activities, dedicated HR expertise can streamline these processes.

It’s hard to recruit the perfect HR candidate because the necessary skills and experience might not become clear until after you've made a hire. Hiring decisions are often made with incomplete information about the organisation’s future needs – and today, business needs are often dynamic and require agility. 

Should you hire internally or outsource HR?

HR outsourcing involves outsourcing some or all of your HR function out to an external team, such as HumanX. Outsourcing your HR can assist in a number of areas: 

• Immediately filling skill and experience gaps
• Resolving urgent or critical workplace issues
• Lightening the load of your in-house HR team
• Collaborating on strategic planning  
• Optimising and streamlining current HR processes
• Identifying workplace culture or engagement issues  
• Maintaining compliance with employment law as the organisation grows 
• Assessing which skills you actually need in-house, and more.

Outsourcing your HR essentially gives you access to a broad and deep range of HR expertise without the multiple overheads of a full-time employee. Depending on your needs, you could gain an entire team, multiple degrees and many years of experience for the price of one new hire. 

There’s also benefit in accessing the whole gamut of skills in a multi-disciplinary team, because your HR support can take a holistic approach to your needs. 

HumanX provides expert HR consulting, outsourcing and services to help organisations implement best practices and elevate the human experience at work. To get a feel for how our team brings new insights and support to modern workplaces, keep browsing our handy resources, or get in touch.